


I Never Liked The Quiet Before

by ReaperWriter



Series: Mansion House Nocturnes [5]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Angst, Civil War, F/M, Grief, Guilt, Introspection, Mansion House Hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 20:18:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6391804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he was young, church was something done because it was expected.  </p>
<p>Henry hasn't walked a straight path to Alexandria.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Never Liked The Quiet Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercuryGray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/gifts).



When he was young, church was something done because it was expected.  Everyone in the little town he’d grown up in, there in the red, iron soaked clay of Western Pennsylvania put on their nicest clothes on Sundays, and on Christmas morning, and filed into the old white clapboard building.  They dutifully listened to the minister, sang the hymns required of them, made their small offerings for the good the congregation and the poor, the orphans and the widows.  And then they went home.

And his father would read them a few verses a night as his mother darned socks and Susannah did handwork and he fixed the old leather harness for their cart horse.  They were Christian, nominally, and they made the motions for the pantomime of it, but that was all it ever seemed to him.  A clever pantomime.  Until that summer he was sixteen, and Joshua Farris made those rude comments about Susannah. 

If Henry Hopkins loved anything in this world, it was his sister Susannah.  And when she came to him, crying so hard she could hardly breathe, he had never known a rage so deep and consuming.  He had found Joshua down by the swimming hole, the one where boys would wile away time when chorse were done.  And he had beaten him.

In the light of day, after the red haze of rage had dissipated, and he starred at the blood- on his hands, on Joshua’s battered face, on his clean white shirt- he felt something in himself break.  His father finally found him in that little clapboard church, on his knees rocking and praying.

From that day, he sought God in every moment.  He read the Bible until the pages had smudged, until the spine cracked and became worn.  In every spare moment he wasn’t attending to chores, he was haunting the chapel, speaking to Reverend Muller.  It was the Reverend who suggested to his father that he might find peace in a vocation. 

His first year at the seminary in Gettysburg, Susannah wrote him every week.  News of home.  News of Abel Sampson, who was courting her.  And one frigidly cold day, news that Joshua Farris, never right again after that day, had frozen to death so close to home.  He’d spent two solid days on his knees at the altar, begging for forgiveness until the head of his program dragged him, weak and dehydrated, to his bed. By the time he finished his courses and took his ordination, Henry had developed scars on his knees.

Susannah was gone when he came home.  Married to Abel Sampson and gone west for more land, better land to work.  He stayed long enough to pay his respects to his parents, and then went to his new assignment.  The little church in the little town in Illinois was a balm to his soul, two years of peace and contemplation.  And then came the news of Sumter, and war.

Young pastors, those unmarried and without families, were called by the synods and asked to go into the service as Chaplains.  And he thought perhaps this was his penance.  That he would go into the fray, unarmed, to minister to the scared and the dying, until death took him. 

Instead, he found himself in this former grandiose hotel, surrounded by the hopeless and the hopeful, the broken and the maimed.  And he so often felt out of his depth.  Perhaps never more so then trying to minister to Tom Fairfax.  He would be lying if he said it was entirely altruistic.  He would be lying if he said that the hope in Miss Green’s eyes wasn’t at least partial motivation.  But he’d also be lying if he didn’t recognize that lost look in the man’s eyes.  That he didn’t see it in the mirror when he shaves.  That he didn’t wake with it, gasping, remembering Joshua Farris mumbling and drooling.  When his frozen corpse rose in his dreams.

Tom’s death is all the more tragic for it, for the knowledge he had taken it himself.  That the demon he fought every day had bested the boy.  That his demons had overcome the better angels of his nature.  And that Henry was really no better, as he comforted poor Emma.  That there were days when he too wished to be at rest, to accept whatever came after.  To take the punishment he so richly deserved.

No, he wasn’t a good man.  Apparently, he wasn’t even a very good minister if he couldn’t win the broken back to the light.  But when he saw the look Emma Green gave him, he felt the one thing he supposed Tom didn’t.  Hope.  Hope, that maybe one day with God’s grace, he could be.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I spent the evening breaking myself with musical theater. This is what comes of that.
> 
> And for MercuryGray, who is also good at breaking our hearts.


End file.
